STAR on Windows vs Linux

I wonder how many users of STAR-suite actually run it on Windows? In my experience there are some very basic errors when running on Windows which aren't present in Linux. There are, of course, some obvious reasons for this. However, I was wondering if Windows users could post their experiences of STAR here and what cause it to crash.

I use both. My company pays for me to have a windows version at home and I use LINUX at work. Here are a few observations that others may or may not agree with:

STAR-CD was optimized on LINUX and it runs faster on LINUX than UNIX, WINDOWS, etc. The 32 bit version of windows will only address about 3 1/2 gig of memory, so your model size may be somewhat limited compared to LINUX; some drivers for the 64 bit XP are not available and most games will not work on it for your home computer, so if you are sharing your machine with your family, they may not like it. At one time I had my home machine set up as a dual boot system, LINUX and XP. That worked some, but I like using the windows version better because I can do my other work as well; i.e, using EXCEL, MathCad, etc. Now that I have a dual core processor, STAR-CD doesn't bring my machine to a halt. For small quick jobs, XP is easy to use. When the models get over a million cells, I only use LINUX.

If you are trying to use one of the CAD modules, I think they only work on WINDOWS

My machines at work are eight 32 bit machines running LINUX and one 64 bit machine runing LINUX. I build my models and pre and post process on the 64 bit machine and run on the eight 32 bit machines. I access them using a WINDOWS XP machine using Exceed.

Personally I can't stand windows and I find Linux far more flexible for CFD, saying that windows does have advantages for the reasons mentioned above (CAD, excel etc etc). There is a remote desktop pacakge for Linux that is great and I just rdesk into windows machines to do the CAD then use and use a programe (the name of which escapes me at the mo) which allows you to log on explore and transfer files from one to the other.

Much as I hate to disagree with tom but you can only access 2 gig on a 32 bit CPU and windows has a lot of "background" memory usage that will further degrade this. Beyond this of course clustering and distributed parallel is infinately better and easier on linux, and although windows is now launching CCS to bring clustering to windows its lagging years behind the Linux functionality.

I was told by our IS and have read on the internet and in magazines that XP Pro will address 3 1/2 gig. (My machine has 3 gig and have I used it all on meshing before) XP Home and W2K will address only 2 gig and 95,98&Me will addresss only 512meg.

Interestingly, STAR-CD on a LINUX machine will open an output file only 2gig large. So if you have a larger file (for a transient for example) use prostar to divide the file up.